The C-Word (3 page)

‘We can’t call Mum while she’s on the train,’ I said to P, subtly suggesting with a ‘we’ that it wasn’t a given that I would be making the call. ‘We’ll have to speak to Dad.’ And so we did. No – P did.

Another nurse appeared to take me for my core biopsy, and P nodded as I was led away. ‘I’ll do it now,’ he said, in a show of selfless courage that was to become typical of his behaviour throughout The Bullshit. I don’t know what was said in that phone call. I don’t
ever
want to know what was said in that phone call.

Feeling helplessly guilty that my stupid, stupid body was soon to break the hearts of my dad, mum and brilliant kid brother Jamie, just as it had my husband before them, I headed into the small, dark room, sat on the bed and stripped to the waist, still snivelling and shaking and stupefied. The nurse explained how the core biopsy was going to work, but of course I wasn’t listening, and so it came as an excruciating shock when what can only be described as an apple corer shot into my bust, pulling with it a sample of the tumour that was threatening to ruin my life, and leaving me bruised and swollen. All the while I stared, moist-eyed, at a watercolour painting on the opposite wall. To this day, I loathe watercolours.

‘Did you call him?’ I asked P as I walked back into the
waiting
room, though I could tell from his grey pallor that he had. I retched at the thought of P’s words bringing my dad – my brilliant Dad; the one person in the world I most want to be like – such woe with the news that no parent can prepare themselves for. ‘You need to call him,’ P replied solemnly as we walked out of the clinic, bidding the professor and his nurse a purposeful goodbye as we left. (A cancer diagnosis, I’ve discovered, tends to enhance Britishness – pleasantries, talk of the weather, cups of tea … as though in a crisis, politeness is all we have left.)

It’s funny what your brain forgets. More than ‘everything’s going to be okay’, I can’t remember what I told my dad on the phone as P and I drove home from the hospital. Nor can I remember what I told Mum when I later spoke to her. Nor the reactions of my closest friends, who were on the receiving end of the same kind of phone call. Not even the words of my boss, who I called at home that night.

I recently asked my family what they remember of that day, expecting to hear meticulous, blow-by-blow stories of exactly what was said, what the weather was like and what song was on the radio. But not even they can recount any details. Mum remembers little more than ‘a feeling of absolute terror’. Dad remembers his head being ‘scrambled’ and trying to hold it together while talking to P, but breaking down as soon as he ended the call. Jamie assumed that Mum must have been wrong when she said ‘it’s cancer’, but abruptly thought ‘fuck me, it’s real’ when he saw Dad in tears two steps behind. And P? Well, P was with me. And short of disbelief, confusion and a sudden inability to swallow, his recollection is as sketchy as mine.

It’s by no means a perfect account of those bleak few hours – certainly not enough for a
Crimewatch
reconstruction, say, or a
Match of the Day
highlights package –
but
those snatched film stills, those tiny moments in time, are what remain on the editing-room floor. It’s as though our minds have wiped it all like a hard drive we’d hoped to protect; as though what was stored is of no use to us; as though we’re better off without it. And I’m grateful. I
want
to be protected from that stuff, from those painful moments that punctuated the beginning of The Bullshit. The phone calls, the conversations, the moment I first saw my parents after they’d thrown what they could into a case, dropping off keys and terrible news with Jamie, before heading down to London as quickly as the speed cameras of the M40 would allow them.

Something neither my brain – nor my hard drive – has wiped, however, was the embarrassingly cop-out, multi-recipient email I sent to the friends I hadn’t told in a phone call.

Subject: Well here I am to stuff up your Wednesday morning
.

Hi everyone

First off, please forgive the group mailer. I won’t beat about the bush here as this is a difficult enough email to send, so here’s the thing: I have breast cancer. We’re hoping it’s only early stages and while it’s very unusual to get it at my age, I’m told that’s actually going to help me in getting over it. I had a core biopsy yesterday which will determine whether the cancer is invasive or non-invasive (we’re gunning for the latter), and that in turn will determine my course of treatment. Either way, after Friday they’ll get straight round to it treatment-wise and it’ll be easier all round (she says, naively) because we can be practical about it all, rather than emotional (and to be honest, I can’t be dealing with the emotional side of
it
). So that’s my news. Sorry to those of you who I’m suddenly back in touch with thanks to this bullshit, and I promise I’ll keep you all posted as much as I can. Now for fuck’s sake, someone tell an inappropriate joke or something
.

Lis xxx

I can’t help but shake my head and snigger patronisingly at that email. The ill-prepared, misinformed, simplified, cancer’s-messing-with-the-wrong-girl tone makes me cringe. I was stupidly ignorant. But what did I know? At that moment, I’d hoped my cancer was early stages, non-invasive and treatable with little more than a mastectomy. My follow-up appointment that Friday revealed a different story.

With Mum and Dad staying at the flat, we somehow filled the two days before my appointment with the strangest of time-occupying tasks: sizing up mini TVs in Dixons so they’d have something to watch in the box room that was to become their second home; choosing a mattress topper in Ikea to make the sofabed more comfortable; pyjama-buying in Marks & Spencer because Mum insisted my mismatched rock t-shirt and shorts combos weren’t suitable for a five-day stay in hospital. It’s very typical of my family, this kind of behaviour – met with a crisis, we immediately turn to the practicalities. We’d say it’s a Midlands thing, but maybe it’s typical of most families? Yes, there’s been a cancer diagnosis, but there’s still laundry to do, mugs to wash, weeds to pull up and
Coronation Street
to watch. These simple, seemingly inane, minute-passers are what I and my family do best. (Run out of hot water, forget the matchday parking ticket, or churn up the lawn with an enthusiastic summertime kickabout, however, and
it
’s meltdown time.) It was our way of making things better, of striving for an indifference to the pain. We couldn’t change the fact that I had cancer, but we could ensure that we had everything in place to make this as smooth a ride as possible, whether it be new pillows or extra teabags or limescale remover for the shower screen.

The problem with that tactic, however, is that you can fill up your days with pointless activities as much as you like, but the emotion’s going to have to come out at some point, and so the rest of those sombre, surreal forty-eight hours was filled with the kind of agonising and wretched heartbreak that makes you unable to speak or eat or stop yourself from crying noisily in the middle of a busy M&S café. Then sadness turns to anger. Mum shouted at a changing room attendant for not allowing us both into the same cubicle. I erupted into a tantrum when the spotty pyjamas she’d brought me to try on made me ‘look like an ill person’. Dad got frustrated with the instruction manuals of the various gadgets he’d bought to keep me occupied in hospital. All we each longed for was something –
anything
– to blame, but shop staff, pyjamas and iPod speakers fell disappointingly short of the mark, and rage morphed back into frustrated, confused despair.

Why we thought shopping was a good idea, I’ll never know. Even at the best of times, we’re not a family who shops well together. For us, the therapy in ‘retail therapy’ is about as exciting a prospect as the therapy in ‘chemotherapy’. Mum is famously short-tempered. Dad is famously uninterested. And I’m famously impatient with their short temper and disinterest. But I guess that in such an otherwise bewildering time, shopping represented something normal. And all we each wanted more than anything else was to enforce some normality on the
situation
, even though everything happening around us was anything but.

We’d get back to the flat after our shopping missions and I’d immediately disappear under my duvet fully clothed, lasting little more than twenty minutes before realising that, actually, I needed company, whether or not I made the most of it. Not that we ever made the most of each other’s company when we weren’t out on pointless shopping trips. We rarely did more than sit and stare at each other – me on the sofa, Dad in the armchair, Mum on the ottoman in the bay window – with baffled tears running down our cheeks until P came home from work, and he joined in too.

But even being surrounded by my favourite people in the world felt hopelessly lonely, because nobody knew what it was like to be stuck in my tortured mind and my useless body – nor was I keen to tell them. I needed an escape. Some people confide in a therapist, but I didn’t have one. Some people go to confession, but I’d never been to church. Some people talk to their cats, but I wasn’t an animal person. If this had been anything other than cancer – a problem with work, say, or a relationship issue – I’d have instinctively spoken to my family and friends about it. But not only was I completely SICK of talking about cancer after mere days of it being in my stratosphere, but its arrival had given each of my confidantes enough of a shock already, and adding my bleak thoughts to that horrible reality wouldn’t have made them or me feel any better. And so my mind was close to capacity with unspoken thoughts and fears and questions and worries and emotions and frustrations, which I had no idea how or where to download.

Until Thursday afternoon, when an email I was writing somehow turned into more of a narrative, and it became clear that I’d turned to my Mac for comfort. (It would never
have
happened on a PC.) And forgive me for offering such a wanky explanation, but writing about the frustrating, life-altering, sheer bloody pain-in-the-arse place in which I found myself seemed the natural thing to do. I wasn’t consciously keeping a diary; I wasn’t even consciously starting a blog – but with more thoughts swimming around my head than I could hold on to, I needed to put them somewhere, and my keyboard offered an easy solution.

I momentarily flattered myself that I could become the Carrie Bradshaw of breast cancer – all long mousy hair, cross-legged on a bed, dreaming of shoes and baring all to a MacBook. But then reality called, and I looked up to find myself not in a couture-filled Upper East Side apartment, but a bargain-crammed flat in Wandsworth. And as much as I might have convinced myself that White Company pyjama bottoms are the height of sophistication, I doubt they could make quite the same style statement as a pink tutu.

And so I passed the time until the following Friday’s consultation by writing my cancer-column. ‘Whatever it is,’ I assured everyone before the appointment, ‘it’s better to know about it. Then we can get back to being practical instead of working ourselves up by guessing.’

P and I introduced my folks to the professor and nurse who we’d seen the previous Tuesday.

‘Oh, it
is
good that you’ve got your parents around you,’ said the nurse as she shook my dad’s hand. ‘Long may it continue,’ she added enigmatically, as my mum clocked her meaning. ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Lisa,’ she said, turning to me, ‘but Prof wants to see the easy ones first; he’d like to spend a bit more time with you.’

I turned to P, then to my folks, as the nurse walked away. Dad later told me that the look on my face will haunt him
for
the rest of his life. ‘Well, that’s it, then,’ I grunted, defeated. ‘She’s preparing me for the worst.’ Nobody disagreed. We all knew that I was about to hear the word ‘invasive’.

That wasn’t all P and I heard. Back in his office, the professor pointed with his rollerball to a diagram of a breast that reminded me of a GCSE Biology paper. He explained that my five-centimetre –
five centimetre!
– tumour wasn’t just invasive, that it was not, in fact, early stages at all, but likely to be grade two or three, depending on whether he discovered a spread to my lymph nodes during my mastectomy.

‘How many grades are there?’ I asked, a cancer novice desperate to learn more.

‘Four,’ said the nurse.

‘Shit,’ I exhaled, quickly apologising for the expletive I’d let slip. I pulled my chair forward and rested both forearms on the professor’s desk, my hands flat out on the dark oak, meaning business. ‘What I can’t understand,’ I asserted, oddly cold and businesslike, ‘is how I didn’t find this sooner. How neither of us found this sooner,’ I continued, gesturing to P. ‘I mean, it’s five centimetres!’

The professor drew more shapes on the breast diagram to demonstrate how the tumour had been growing immediately beneath my nipple, and had only begun to push out to the side – the side where P and I discovered it – as it had grown.

Mum couldn’t hide her disbelief either. ‘How didn’t anybody pick this up?’ she shrieked at the nurse, accusatorily. ‘How can it be a cyst one moment and a huge, invasive tumour the next?’ I was mortified.

‘Let me fetch you all some tea and I’ll answer your
questions
,’ said the nurse. It was clearly not the first time she’d been in such a situation.

‘I just think it’s
appalling
that nobody picked this up!’ Mum yelled, getting louder and redder with every word. Dad was in pieces, clearly having the same angry thoughts but physically unable to verbalise them due to the wails that were choking him. P’s head was held in his quivering hands as he stared at the patch of carpet that was soaking up his grief-stricken tears. And all of this was my doing. It was my body, my breast, my cancer that had sent my mum insanely livid, my dad deranged with distress and my husband into funereal melancholy. They were reacting as though I’d died, and yet there I sat, party to this tragic scene. I looked from Dad to Mum to P from Dad to P, to Mum. This was all too much. I was suffocating. I couldn’t handle it.